Civil Service location frustration

[FoxHedgehogBadger]

Not an AIBU or question, just a rant really.
I’m civil service, London-based, looking for a new job at the moment.
There’s a big drive to push civil service jobs out of London, which I do understand the reasoning behind.
Here’s my big frustration: So many jobs are advertised, with the location given as something like “Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Sheffield”.
So basically, they are not trying to build a team or department in a specific place, you are going to work in a local hub office, probably sitting without any direct colleagues.
So if the job can actually be done anywhere, why not just let me apply to do that in London!

Because the rest of us need well paid solid employment options

Not in the CS but this is how my company is expanding across the UK. Has pros and cons.

I’m with you OP. It’s equally frustrating when you’re trying to recruit and the pool is limited as is the case for my profession outside of London. I do understand trying to get more jobs out of London, but it’s really frustrating when we have a thriving team and office in London and are struggling to recruit. We generally manage to put in a business case to enable London recruitment though after many unsuccessful campaigns in the early days of the push.

Not all of us can afford to live in London, even on professional salaries.

Are you sure they are not roles for multiple jobs. Often they have campaigns where they are taking on multiple people in multiple locations so they will be sitting with local colleagues.

Budget also. London gets extra weighting.

You could always commute from London to one of the regional offices. Plenty of people commute the other way.

Well no, they are not trying to build a team or department in a specific place, they are offering recruitment opportunities across the country to get a good pool of candidates and, probably, spend less money paying people more to work in London. I’m surprised you haven’t done more remote working up til now tbh.

Some of those cities already have a big civil service presence so chances are you will.be working with colleagues. London has never had a monopoly of civil service jobs.

But it’s about teams not just numbers of civil servants. We have offices in cities where we literally have one person from our team in each office, going into those offices is entirely pointless (thankfully we are a chill organisation that doesn’t enforce office working), one of them actually expenses into London once a fortnight to meet with us.

We have such a centralised economy already, it makes perfect sense for CS jobs to be offered outside of London wherever possible. As others have said, nothing to stop you from commuting out of London just as many people commute into London. Especially if it's hybrid working, which it probably is!

Good luck with the job hunt!

Yes I get this. I’m due to start in a CS department next week and I chose my location from a list and was allocated this specific location

I now learn it’s a hub office and the last two people who worked out of it have now left the organisation and no one really knows if this office is still open.

so that’s a bit odd

This is currently me and I’d rather do this than move to London. Office attendance is a different thread!

It’s cheaper as the national pay scales are a fair bit less than the London ones.

Is it a mass campaign? How many vacancies?

Or is it that you'll be based at a location, then travel all over outside of that? I'm technically based at an office I've attended five times in six years. All my work related travel is done by train these days, so it's done using internal bookings.

It’s not a different thread though really is it, office attendance and location goes hand in hand. And I wasn’t even complaining, this works for our staff member and our team. But it’s not a problem for us as we are very flexible and don’t enforce the office mandate, but god help us if Reform get in in a few years, or the Tories back.

Also I do get some people really hate going to the office when they are the only person in their team, but I don’t mind it tbh as there are still people form the division- also I have made friends who I don’t work with directly, it is possible! I also generally prefer the office to wfh and it is definitely good for disrupting the bias towards all the most interesting jobs being London based.

I found them very lonely places. Some build a team based on location, but often they have one team thats based there and a gang of orphans from other teams.

Agree it can seem frustrating because obvs the job CAN be done in London. However the CS has an additionally responsibility to spread the jobs throughout the UK, so it’s reasonable for London to be excluded. It’s the same principle I think of the UK Gov procuring a more expensive product or service because it offers employment to UK staff when the cheapest option doesn’t.

I agree it doesn’t make sense. It’s also frustrating because I saw a CS role recently that I might have been interested in, but it was in London with an 80% in-office requirement, and a salary that would in no way enable me to continue living in London.

If it based elsewhere OR had a lower office requirement then we could move out and I could afford to do the job (and commute in if need be). Atm I work in the private sector but would contemplate the huge pay cut for the work life balance, but it just doesn’t add up at all.

I more meant the whole office attendance debate is a different thread, as in enforcing it or not is a contentious issue. I agree that policing 60% is silly in those circs and my team don’t do it either, although I do 50% by choice.

Yes, I manage a team of civil servants. With 8 of us we are in four different locations and three different countries (England, Wales, Scotland). I need to manage them to attend the(ir) office 60% of the time for the “collaboration opportunity” but in reality if the team meets in person it’s a highly expensive enterprise.

Yeah I think that’s my whole issue with these broad brush mandates across the civil service be that office attendance or location rules, the CS is a vast thing with hundreds of different organisations, locations, cultures, skill sets. The location rules might work fine for some orgs, but it won’t for others, I just kind of wish some common sense and grown up mentally could be applied, but appreciate it’s more politically charged than that and not a simple thing.

I'm in Cornwall and saw a spectacular HEO Cabinet Office role recently, absolutely something I'd love to do but again 60% attendance in Central London. Impossible on £37k!

HEO should be much higher than that! It was about £40k outside of London 15+ years ago!